No trace found of Garcia Lorca's remains: Spanish official



MADRID- Teams searching for the remains of Federico Garcia Lorca have found no trace of the Spanish poet who was executed during the civil war, after some two months of work, a regional official said Friday.
Garcia Lorca, Spain's most widely acclaimed 20th century poet, was shot by supporters of right-wing General Francisco Franco at the start of Spain's 1936-39 civil war. They denounced him as a republican, a Communist and a homosexual.



A poem dedicated to Lorca on a tree in the park where the poet is believed to be buried
A poem dedicated to Lorca on a tree in the park where the poet is believed to be buried
His body, along with three other men who faced the firing squad, was believed to have been dumped into a mass grave in Alfaca, near Granada in southern Spain.
But Begona Alvares, the justice minister for the Andalucia region, said Friday that excavation work there since early November had found "there have never been any burials" at the site.
"They have meticously sifted through the earth without finding a single bone, article of clothing or cartridge case," she told reporters.
A report by the archaeologists at the site said "there is no doubt" that "in the whole area that was excavated there have never been mass graves or humans remains."
The site was opened at the request of family members of other victims thought to have been buried with Garcia Lorca.
The poet's relatives had opposed the exhumation work and had not provided samples of their DNA to make identification of his bones possible.
That led some historians to speculate that Garcia Lorca's father may have secretly transported his bones to the family's summer home near Granada.
Garcia Lorca was just 38 when he was killed. His poems and plays, which deal with universal themes such as love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice, are widely studied at universities.
He is one of the 130,000 civilians killed by Franco's forces who were never accounted for, according to an estimate by the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory.
While Franco's regime honoured its own dead, it left its opponents buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country, which are only now being unearthed with the encouragement of Spain's Socialist government.
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Saturday, December 19th 2009
AFP
           


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